Post Magazine has a piece about the post production process for the TV Show “Mad Men,” which I have been hooked on. If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth a look. The show itself has a very distinctive feel, and this article goes into a bit of how that feel is achieved.
Adobe put out a press release to announce that Creative Suite 4 is now shipping. Super!
Ever since the release of firmware 1.11 for the Sony EX1, there’s been some hubbub in the community about support for third party memory cards, as an alternative to the very expensive SXS cards from Sony and Sandisk.
There’s a great thread at DVInfo with lots of real world results about what works and what doesn’t. Shockingly, it seems like the best combo right now is a Kensington expresscard media reader combined with some Sandisk SDHC cards. So, instead of $850 for a 16gig sony SXS, you can drop $65 for a 16gig SDHC card and be on your way. Read the thread to find out the pros and cons – it’s not all puppies and rainbows, but very nearly…
ProVideoCoalition has some shots from a little Sony show out in CA. One of the interesting things is the Nipros rig for the Sony EX3. I’d heard a bit of discussion about this rig in the past, but hadn’t seen any shots.
If you’re familiar with the Camplex line of products, it’s very similar – a little box that muxes together a bunch of connections, spews it down fiber, and another box that demuxes it at the other end.
You get intercom, return video and remote control, plus an HD-SDI feed. There aren’t enough specs out yet to really evaluate the product, but it could be pretty interesting. Sony says $29k will get you an EX3 + the rig, though perhaps you’d want to drop another $15k for a nicer lens.
As promised, I’m posting some sample code for converting from DFXP to SCC. Actually, the SCC generated is contained in a class (captionConvertClass.php) independent of the DFXP parsing. To use it, all you do is:
$myClass = new captionConvert(startingTimecode);
$myClass->addCaptions(time,caption);
$finishedCaptions = $myClass->outputCaptions();
the “startingTimecode” item is somewhat important. Quicktime files can have timecode tracks that don’t start at zero, but DFXP captions are always relative to a 00:00:00.00 start time. So, if the timecode track of your movie begins at 01:00:00:00 (as any file coming out of FCP will) but your DFXP file starts at 00:00:00.00, you need to let the convertor know so that it adds the right times.
Otherwise, it’s pretty simple and pretty basic. There are lots of things it doesn’t do (scc formating, proper Drop Frame handling, foreign characters, etc). But at least it’s a start. If you want to see conversion done right, look at SCC Tools, which is much more feature complete, at the expense of being much more complicated and … perl.
captionConvert.phps (sample dfxp parsing)
captionConvertClass.phps (plain text -> scc conversion)
TUAW is reporting that Techspansion is shutting its door and, thusly, killing off VisualHub. That’s a big loss for video conversion on the mac platform. Hopefully someone will come along to fill their shoes. Bummer.
The recently released Quicktime 7.5.5 update brings back the ability to display the 1080i H.264 files generated by the Sanyo Xacti HD1000. Nifty!
So, there’s all sorts of news today about how Mac Pros emit toxic odors that will murder us all.
Normally I wouldn’t bother posting this, but I found it humorous. When I got my Mac Pro a couple years ago, I gave it a name based on a particular characteristic I noticed:
Oh noes!
Freshdv pointed me to an HDFilmTools.com video about some of Arri’s new accessories for small form factor HD cameras. The video shows off their new matte box, follow focus and support rails, all mounted to a Sony XDCam EX1. I hadn’t realized Arri was so enthusiastic about this space – some of the off-brand matte units have been pretty cheesy, so it’s nice to see them raising the standards a bit.